UNIVERSITY OF THE PUNJAB

TOPIC OF ASSIGNMENT:

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

By

Shoukat ullah

Advised by

Dr. Rubina Shoaib

ROLL NO: 39

Semester: 4TH

DEPARTMENTS: HISTORY AND PAKISTAN studies

 The Industrial Revolution:
The era known as the Industrial Revolution was a period in which
fundamental changes occurred in agriculture, textile and metal
manufacture, transportation, economic policies and the social structure
in England. This period is appropriately labeled “revolution,” for it
thoroughly destroyed the old manner of doing things; yet the term is
simultaneously inappropriate, for it connotes abrupt change. The
changes that occurred during this period (1760-1850), in fact, occurred
graduallyi1. The year 1760 is generally accepted as the “eve” of the
Industrial Revolution. In reality, this eve began more than two centuries
before this date. The late 18th century and the early l9th century
brought to fruition the ideas and discoveries of those who had long
passed on, such as, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes and others
The Industrial Revolution may be defined as the application of power-
driven machinery to manufacturing. It had its beginning in remote
times, and is still continuing in some places. In the eighteenth century
all of western Europe began to industrialize rapidly, but in England the
process was most highly accelerated. England's head start may be
attributed to the emergence of a number of simultaneous
factors. Britain had burned up her magnificent oak forests in its
fireplaces, but large deposits of coal were still available for industrial
fuel. There was an abundant labor supply to mine coal and iron, and to
man the factories. From the old commercial empire there remained a
fleet, and England still possessed colonies to furnish raw materials and
act as captive markets for manufactured goods. Tobacco merchants of
Glasgow and tea merchants of London and Bristol had capital to invest
and the technical know-how derived from the Scientific Revolution of
the seventeenth century2. Last, but not least important, the insularity of
England saved industrial development from being interrupted by war.
Soon all western Europe was more or less industrialized, and the

1
S.T. Ashton, The Industrial revolution: (Landon Oxford University press)5
2
E. R. Hard, Human document of the Industrial revolution (New York praeger press 1966)11
 coming of electricity and cheap steel after 1850 further speeded the
process.

Origins of the Industrial Revolution:

The first Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain after 1750. There
were several factors that combined to make Great Britain an ideal place
for industrialization. First, the Agricultural Revolution of the 18th
century created a favorable climate for industrialization.3
By increasing food production, the British population could be fed at
lower prices with less effort than ever before. The surplus of food meant
that British families could use the money they saved to purchase
manufactured goods. The population increase in Britain and the exodus
of farmers from rural to urban areas in search of wage-labor created a
ready pool of workers for the new industries.
Britain had financial institutions in place, such as a central bank, to
finance new factories. The profits Britain had enjoyed due to booming
cotton and trade industries allowed investors to support the
construction of factories.
British entrepreneurs interested in taking risks to make profits were
leading the charge of industrialization. The English revolutions of the
17th century had fostered a spirit of economic prosperity. Early
industrial entrepreneurs were willing to take risks on the chance that
they would reap financial rewards later.

The first industrial revolution from 1760:

Following a slow period of proto-industrialization, this first revolution
spans from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 19th
century. It witnessed the emergence of mechanization, a process that
replaced agriculture with industry as the foundations of the economic

3
Martin, Gilbert. British History Atlas, (New York Macmillan press 1968)28
 structure of society4. Mass extraction of coal along with the invention of
the steam engine created a new type of energy that trusted forward all
processes thanks to the development of railroads and the acceleration
of economic, human and material exchanges. Other major inventions
such as forging and new know-how in metal shaping gradually drew up
the blueprints for the first factories and cities as we know them today.

The second industrial revolution – 1870

Nearly a century later at the end of the 19th century, new technological
advancements initiated the emergence of a new source of energy:
electricity, gas and oil. As a result, the development of the combustion
engine set out to use these new resources to their full
potential. Furthermore, the steel industry began to develop and grow
alongside the exponential demands for steel. Chemical synthesis also
developed to bring us synthetic fabric, dyes and fertilizer5. Methods of
communication were also revolutionized with the invention of the
telegraph and the telephone and so were transportation methods with
the emergence of the automobile and the plane at the beginning of the
20th century. All these inventions were made possible by centralizing
research and capital structured around an economic and industrial
model based on new “large factories” and the organizational models of
production as envisioned by Taylor and Ford.

The third industrial revolution – 1969

Nearly a century later, in the second half of the 20th century, a third
industrial revolution appeared with the emergence of a new type of
energy whose potential surpassed its predecessors: nuclear energy. This
revolution witnessed the rise of electronics—with the transistor and
microprocessor—but also the rise of telecommunications and
computers. This new technology led to the production of miniaturized
material which would open doors, most notably to space research

4
J,D. Chambers, The Workshop of the world (Landon, Oxford University press 1966)155
5
E. R. Hard, Human document of the Industrial revolution (New York praeger press 1966)95
 and biotechnology. For industry, this revolution gave rise to the era of
high-level automation in production thanks to two major inventions:
automatons and robots.

The Industrial Revolution Start in England:

By the end of the 19th century, the island of Great Britain, which is
about the size of the state of Louisiana, controlled the largest empire in
the history of the world—an empire that covered one quarter of the
world’s land mass. You will learn more about this empire in the next
chapter. But how did this little island come to rule an empire? How did
Great Britain acquire so much military and economic power in the
world? The answer, of course, is that it had an enormous commercial
and technological head start over the rest of the world because the
Industrial Revolution started in England6. But why did the Industrial
Revolution occur first in England and not somewhere else in the world?
Historians describe a confluence—a coming together—of many factors
and they do not agree on which are most important. Some of these
factors we discussed earlier because they had their seeds in pre-
industrial society. All of these factors came together in the late 18th
century to create the unique conditions in England that culminated in
the first-ever Industrial Revolution:

I. The Agricultural Revolution

The English countryside was transformed between 1760 and 1830 as
the open-field system of cultivation gave way to compact farms and
enclosed fields. The rotation of nitrogen-fixing and cereal crops
obviated the necessity of leaving a third or half the land fallow each
planting. Another feature of the new farming was the cultivation of
turnips and potatoes. Jethro Tull (1674-1741) and Lord Townshend
popularized the importance of root crops. Tull's most original
contributions were the seed drill and horse hoe. The seed drill allowed a

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Martin, Gilbert. British History Atlas, (New York Macmillan press 1968)233
 much greater proportion of the seed to germinate by planting it below
the surface of the ground out of reach of the birds and wind. ''Turnip''
Townshend was famous for his cultivation of turnips and clover on his
estate of Raynham in Norfolk.
He introduced the four-course rotation of crops:
wheat
turnips
oats or barley
Clover.
Robert Bakewell (1725-1795) pioneered in the field of systematic stock
breeding. Prior to this, sheep had been valued for wool and cattle for
strength; Bakewell showed how to breed for food quality. Bakewell
selected his animals, inbred them, kept elaborate genealogical records,
and maintained his stock carefully7. He was especially successful with
sheep, and before the century's end his principle of inbreeding was well
established. Under Bakewell's influence, Coke of Holkham in Norfolk not
only improved his own farms, but every year held ''sheep shearings'' to
which farmers from all over Europe came for instruction and the
exchange of knowledge.
Propaganda for the new agriculture was largely the work of Arthur
Young. In 1793 the Board of Agriculture was established, and Arthur
Young was its secretary. Although a failure as a practical farmer, he
was a great success as a publicist for scientific agriculture. Even George
III ploughed some land at Buckingham Palace and asked his friends to
call him ''Farmer George.''

7
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 II. Technological Change since 1700:
The technological changes of the eighteenth century did not appear
suddenly. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the methods
of making glass, clocks, and chemicals advanced markedly. By 1700 in
England, and by 1750 in France, the tendency of the state and the
guilds to resist industrialization was weakening. In fact, popular interest
in industrialization resembled the wave of enthusiasm elicited by
experimental agriculture.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century in England, the use of
machines in manufacturing was already widespread8. In 1762 Matthew
Bolton built a factory which employed more than six hundred workers,
and installed a steam engine to supplement power from two large
waterwheels which ran a variety of lathes and polishing and grinding
machines. In Staffordshire an industry developed which gave the world
good cheap pottery; chinaware brought in by the East India Company
often furnished a model. Josiah Wedgewood (1730-1795) was one of
those who revolutionized the production and sale of pottery. From 1700
on, the Staffordshire potters used waterwheels or windmills to turn
machines which ground and mixed their materials. After 1850
machinery was used extensively in the pottery-making process. The
price of crockery fell, and eating and drinking consequently became
more hygienic.

The textile industry had some special problems. It took four spinners to
keep up with one cotton loom, and ten persons to prepare yarn for one
woolen weaver. Spinners were busy, but weavers often had to be idle
for lack of yarn. In 1733 John Kay, a Lancashire mechanic, patented his
flying shuttle. Weaving could then be done more quickly, but it still was
delayed until yarn was available in more abundance. In 1771 Richard
Arkwright's ''water frame'' was producing yarn. About the same time,

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J,D. Chambers, The Workshop of the world (Landon, Oxford University press 1966)96
 James Hargreaves (d. 1778) patented a spinning jenny on which one
operator could spin many threads simultaneously. Then in 1779 Samuel
Crompton combined the jenny and the water frame in a machine
known as ''Crompton's mule,'' which produced quantities of fine, strong
yarn. The yarn famine had come to an end.
Between 1780 and 1860 other textile processes were mechanized. In
1784 a machine was patented which printed patterns on the surface of
cotton or linen by means of rollers. In 1894 Northrup produced an
automatic loom, and when the power loom became efficient, women
replaced men as weavers, although there were still hand weavers in the
paisley shawl trade as late as 1850. By 1812 the cost of making cotton
yarn had dropped nine-tenths, and by 1800 the number of workers
needed to turn wool into yarn had been reduced by four-fifths. And by
1840 the labor cost of making the best woolen cloth had fallen by at
least half.

A. The Steam Engine:

The steam engine provided a landmark in the industrial development of
Europe. The first modern steam engine was built by an engineer,
Thomas Newcomens, in 1705 to improve the pumping equipment used
to eliminate seepage in tin and copper mines. Newcomen's idea was to
put a vertical piston and cylinder at the end of a pump handle. He put
steam in the cylinder and then condensed it with a spray of cold water;
the vacuum created allowed atmospheric pressure to push the piston
down9. In 1763 James watt, an instrument-maker for Glasgow
University, began to make improvements on Newcomen's engine. He
made it a reciprocating engine, thus changing it from an atmospheric to
a true "steam engine." He also added a crank and flywheel to provide
rotary motion.

In 1774 the industrialist Michael Boulton took Watt into partnership,

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E. R. Hard, Human document of the Industrial revolution (New York praeger press 1966)189
 and their firm produced nearly five hundred engines before Watt's
patent expired in 1800. Water power continued in use, but the factory
was now liberated from the streamside. A Watt engine drove Robert
Fulton's experimental steam vessel Clermont up the Hudson in 1807.

B. Electric Power:
It was not until 1873 that a dynamo capable of prolonged operation
was developed, but as early as 1831 Michael Faraday demonstrated
how electricity could be mechanically produced. Through the
nineteenth century the use of electric power was limited by small
productive capacity, short transmission lines, and high cost10. Up to
1900 the only cheap electricity was that produced by generators
making use of falling water in the mountains of southeastern France
and northern Italy. Italy, without coal resources, soon had electricity in
every village north of Rome. Electric current ran Italian textile looms
and, eventually, automobile factories. As early as 1890 Florence
boasted the world's first electric streetcar.

The electrification of Europe proceeded apace in the twentieth century.

Russia harnessed the Dneiper River and the Irish Free State built power
plants on the River Shannon. Germany was supplied with electricity in
the 1920's, and by 1936 Great Britain had built an ''electric grid''
completely covering the country. Electricity was a major factor in the
phenomenally rapid industrialization of Russia in the 1930's.

C. Railroads:
The coming of the railroads greatly facilitated the industrialization of
Europe. At mid. eighteenth century the plate or rail track had been in
common use for moving coal from the pithead to the colliery or furnace.
After 1800 flat tracks were in use outside London, Sheffield, and
Munich. With the expansion of commerce, facilities for the movement

10
S.T. Ashton, The Industrial revolution: (Landon Oxford University press)147
of goods from the factory to the ports or cities came into pressing
demand. In 1801 Richard Trevithick had an engine pulling trucks around
the mine where he worked in Cornwall. By 1830 a railway was opened
from Liverpool to Manchester; and on this line George Stephenson's
''Rocket'' pulled a train of cars at fourteen miles an hour.

The big railway boom in Britain came in the years 1844 to 1847. The
railway builders had to fight vested interests-for example, canal
stockholders, turnpike trusts, and horse breeders-but by 1850, aided by
cheap iron and better machine tools, a network of railways had been
built. By midcentury railroad trains travelling at thirty to fifty miles an
hour were not uncommon, and freight steadily became more important
than passengers. After 1850 in England the state had to intervene to
regulate what amounted to a monopoly of inland transport. But as time
went on the British railways developed problems. The First World War
(1914-1918) found them suffering from overcapitalization, rising costs,
and state regulation.

British success with steam locomotion, however, was enough to

encourage the building of railroads in most European countries, often
with British capital, equipment, and technicians. Railroads became a
standard item of British export. After 1842 France began a railroad
system which combined private and public enterprise. The government
provided the roadbed and then leased it to a private company which
provided the equipment. In Russia, Canada, and the United States,
railways served to link communities separated by vast distances. In
Germany there were no vast empty spaces, but railroads did help to
affect political and economic integration.

D. Advances in Transportation
 The internal combustion engine was developed in Europe before 1900,
but in the American automobile it came into its own11. By mid-
twentieth century, middle-class and working-class people owned
automobiles in Europe as well as in the United States, and the motorcar
began to transform social patterns. It has been said with some truth
that Americans in the twentieth century carried on a love affair with
their automobiles; certainly motorcars were marketed as sex and status
symbols. But at the same time, the growth of the automobile industry
created large fields for investment, produced new types of service
occupations, and revolutionized road-making. This was true in western
Europe as well as in America after the Second World War.
The First World War saw the beginning of commercial aviation.
Germany's geographical position and the ban on military aircraft
imposed by the peace treaty led to the development of civilian airlines.
By 1929 commercial planes were flying out of the European capitals to
all important places on the globe. And the day was not far off when
airplanes were to eclipse railroad trains as commercial passenger
carriers.

E. The Steamship:
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the steam-driven ship
appeared on the horizon. From 1770 onward various men had
experimented with engines in boats in England, Scotland, and the
United States. When Robert Fulton's Clermont travelled up the Hudson
to Albany, tradition has it, people on the bank seeing the sparks from
the smokestack thought the Devil had gone by on a raft. In 1811 Bell
built the Comet and ran it for eight years between Glasgow and a port
twenty-five miles distant. Two basic economic problems in connection
with steam vessels soon came to light12. First, the self-propelled ship
was more expensive to build and operate than sailing vessels; and

11
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E. R. Hard, Human document of the Industrial revolution (New York praeger press 1966)221
 second, its boiler and machinery were so bulky that there was little
room left for passengers. The technical problems were solved shortly,
but the economic aspects took more time. Yet the steamship had some
undeniable advantages: lt could not be becalmed, it was not helpless in
a storm, and it could arrive and depart under its own power. By the
1840's the North Atlantic was crossed regularly by steamship.

In 1839 Sir Samuel Cunard secured from the British government a

contract to carry mails between Liverpool, Halifax, and Boston. The run
was a great success, and soon Cunard was operating a regular
schedule. The tremendous growth of steamship traffic in the last half of
the nineteenth century was accompanied by significant improvements
in hull design, engines, and fuel. By 1839 the propellor had replaced the
paddle wheel, steel replaced iron in the hull, and multi-cylinder engines
became available. After 1920 the diesel engine, much smaller and
lighter than a steam unit of equal power, marked another major
changeover.

III. Communications:
A penny post on all letters was inaugurated in Britain in 1840 after it
was discovered that handling, not the distance sent, was the critical
cost in delivering mall. All letters weighing a half-ounce or less could be
carried for an English penny (two cents). By 1875 the Universal Postal
Union had been established to facilitate the transmission of mail
between foreign countries. In 1871 telegraph cables reached from
London to Australia; massages could be flashed halfway around the
globe in a matter of minutes, speeding commercial transactions13.

Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 transmitted the human voice over a

wire, although it was several decades before the telephone became
popular. At the end of the century the wireless telegraph became a

13
E. R. Hard, Human document of the Industrial revolution (New York praeger press 1966)228
 standard safety device on oceangoing vessels. Radio did not come until
1920; then it was commercially exploited in America to a much greater
extent than in Europe. In Europe the broadcasting systems were either
operated or closely controlled by the state and did not carry commercial
advertising. The world continued to shrink at a great rate as new means
of transport and communication speeded the pace of life.

IV. Changing Social Patterns:

The Industrial Revolution brought with it an increase in population and
urbanization, as well as new social classes. The increase in population
was nothing short of dramatic. England and Germany showed a growth
rate of something more than one percent annually; at this rate the
population would double in about seventy years. In the United States
the increase was more than three percent, which might have been
disastrous had it not been for a practically empty continent and
fabulous natural resources. Only the population of France tended to
remain static after the eighteenth century. The general population
increase was aided by a greater supply of food made available by the
Agricultural Revolution, and by the growth of medical science and
public health measures which decreased the death rate and added to
the population base.

Until the Industrial Revolution, most of the world's population was

rural. However, by mid-nineteenth century, half of the English people
lived in cities, and by the end of the century, the same was true of other
European countries14. Between 1800 and 1950 most large European
cities exhibited spectacular growth. At the beginning of the nineteenth
century there were scarcely two dozen cities in Europe with a
population of 100,000, but by 1900 there were more than 150 cities of
this size. The rise of great cities can be accounted for in various ways:

14
E. R. Hard, Human document of the Industrial revolution (New York praeger press 1966)243
 First, industrialization called for the concentration of a work force; and
indeed, the factories themselves were often located where coal or some
other essential material was available, as the Ruhr in Germany and Lille
in northern France. Second, the necessity for marketing finished goods
created great urban centers where there was access to water or
railways. Such was the case with Liverpool, Hamburg, Marseilles, and
New York.
And third, there was a natural tendency for established political centers
such as London, Paris, and Berlin to become centers for the banking and
marketing functions of the new industrialism.

Rapid growth of the cities was not an unmixed blessing. The factory
towns of England tended to become rookeries of jerry-built tenements,
while the mining towns became long monotonous rows of company-
built cottages, furnishing minimal shelter and little more. The bad living
conditions in the towns can be traced to lack of good brick, the absence
of building codes, and the lack of machinery for public sanitation. But, it
must be added, they were also due to the factory owners' tendency to
regard laborers as commodities and not as a group of human beings.

In addition to a new factory-owning bourgeoisie, the Industrial

Revolution created a new working class. The new class of industrial
workers included all the men, women, and children laboring in the
textile mills, pottery works, and mines15. Often skilled artisans found
themselves degraded to routine process laborers as machines began to
mass produce the products formerly made by hand. Generally speaking,
wages were low, hours were long, and working conditions unpleasant
and dangerous. The industrial workers had helped to pass the Reform
Bill of 1832, but they had not been enfranchised by it.

Economic growth and the early industrial revolution:

15
S.T. Ashton, The Industrial revolution: (Landon Oxford University press)253
This drawing depicts men working the lock on a section of the Erie Canal. Find
more lyrics like this "I've got a mule, her name is Sal, Fifteen years on the Erie
Canal" on this New York State Canals website.16The transition from an agricultural
to an industrial economy took more than a century in the United States, but that
long development entered its first phase from the 1790s through the 1830s.
The industrial revolution had begun in Britain during the mid-18th century, but the
American colonies lagged far behind the mother country in part because the
abundance of land and scarcity of labor in the New World reduced interest in
expensive investments in machine production17. Nevertheless, with the shift from
hand-made to machine-made products a new era of human experience began
where increased productivity created a much higher standard of living than had
ever been known in the pre-industrial world.

The impact on people:

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, finally, will change not only what we do but also
who we are. It will affect our identity and all the issues associated with it: our
sense of privacy, our notions of ownership, our consumption patterns, the time we
devote to work and leisure, and how we develop our careers, cultivate our skills,
meet people, and nurture relationships. It is already changing our health and
leading to a “quantified” self, and sooner than we think it may lead to human
augmentation. The list is endless because it is bound only by our imagination.
I am a great enthusiast and early adopter of technology, but sometimes I wonder
whether the inexorable integration of technology in our lives could diminish some
of our quintessential human capacities, such as compassion and cooperation. Our
relationship with our smartphones is a case in point. Constant connection may
deprive us of one of life’s most important assets: the time to pause, reflect, and
engage in meaningful conversation.
One of the greatest individual challenges posed by new information technologies
is privacy. We instinctively understand why it is so essential, yet the tracking and

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E. R. Hard, Human document of the Industrial revolution (New York praeger press 1966)266
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sharing of information about us is a crucial part of the new connectivity. Debates
about fundamental issues such as the impact on our inner lives of the loss of
control over our data will only intensify in the years ahead. Similarly, the
revolutions occurring in biotechnology and AI, which are redefining what it means
to be human by pushing back the current thresholds of life span, health, cognition,
and capabilities, will compel us to redefine our moral and ethical boundaries.18

18
Martin, Gilbert. British History Atlas, (New York Macmillan press 1968)285
Bibliography:

Ashton, T. S. The Industrial Revolution. London: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Chambers, J. D. The Workshop of the World. London: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Gilbert, Martin. British History Atlas. New York: Macmillan, 1968.

Pike, E. R. Hard Times: Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution. New York: Praeger, 1966.

Sources:

The Industrial Revolution (By) Ashton, T. S.

The Workshop of the World. (By) Chambers, J. D.

British History Atlas. (By) Gilbert, Martin.

Human Documents of the Industrial Revolution (By) Pike, E. R. Hard Times.

Britannica. Com

History. Com